With over 80 awards from the Public Relations Society of America, Carroll Strategies is a leading company for public relations in New Mexico and the Southwest.

Are you ready to give up your smartphone? What if someone paid you $100,000 for one year of no cell phone? Well, that’s what Vitaminwater is doing. It’s willing to pay one person $100k if they can go one full year with no cell phone. If they make it six months, they get $10,000. Vitaminwater is making a case for healthy living, as well as breaking a serious addiction that’s hurting family time and quality of life. But Nomophobia, the fear of being without your cell phone, is strong, affecting 40% of people. Are you willing to give up your smartphone for a year? You have until January 8, 2019 to enter the contest. Click here to read the “Scroll Free” contest rules.

Coors knows a good promo when they see it. When 101-year-old World War II veteran Andrew Slavonic was asked how he lived so long, he said cracking open a Coors Light every day at four o’clock. That, he said, is the secret to long life. When Coors heard about his secret, they flew out a refrigerator branded with Coors stocked full of Coors Light. And not only that, Andrew and his son are invited to Golden, Colorado, to tour the Coors Light facility. See you in the Rockies, said Coors! And there’s nothing like a secret-to-long-life story to get great press coverage all across the USA. So drink up, and live long!

Drive up to McDonald’s and unlock Burger King’s one-cent whopper via the Burger King app. (Image from adweek.com)

Tom Carroll’s Strategy of the Week

December 7, 2018

Burger King had a problem - sales were down and people weren't downloading its app. So it came up with a new promotion. The ONE CENT WHOPPER. But how you get it is the creative part. If you are within 600 feet of a McDonald's, you can download the BK app and qualify for a one cent Whopper at Burger King. You qualify and then get directions to the nearest Burger King. In this way Burger King gets McDonald's clients to come over to BK and download the app too for future promotions. About 50,000 people have taken advantage of the promo so far, twenty times more than any other promotion it's done. And the Burger King app has moved to #1 on Apple's App Store. It's been a huge success. The deal is valid near 14,000 McDonald's locations, but no word on how Mickey D's feels about it.

Banksy's “Girl With Balloon” shreds after its sale. Image from Sotheby's via news.sky.com.

Tom Carroll’s Strategy of the Week

October 11, 2018

"We got Banksy-ed," said Sotheby's auction house in Europe. At an auction in London on Friday, a painting by the England-based street artist known as Banksy sold for $1.3 million and then immediately self-destructed from a shredder built into the frame of the painting. Banksy himself put the shredder into the frame to destroy the painting if it ever went to auction, a statement on the commercialization of art. Now Banksy is even more famous, his art is totally cutting edge (pardon the pun), and amazingly, the shredded painting is expected to be worth even more!

Two Asian teenagers saw a blank wall at a McDonald's and realized that Mickey D's didn't have any Asians in their in-store marketing photos. So the kids made their own marketing poster and dressed up as McDonald's employees to hang the poster showing them in a McDonald's ad. The poster went unnoticed by the restaurant chain for several weeks. It looked just like their other posters. And when it was discovered, McDonald's was smart enough to go with it, and not get the kids in trouble. Then, Ellen DeGeneres heard about the prank and invited them on to her show where McDonald's paid both kids $25,000 for their marketing project and the story went viral. Now you can watch the whole story from the teenagers.

Coke's taking a hard look at bringing cannabis-infused drinks to the market. It was leaked this week that Coca-Cola is in talks with a Canadian cannabis company to infuse drinks with CBD, cannabidiol, which is considered a health additive, but without the ingredient that will get you stoned. Coke calls it "non-psychoactive CBD," which has anti-inflammatory uses and is legal in the US. But it’s still an extraction from either marijuana or hemp which both remain illegal at the federal level.

Coke is testing the waters. People want CBD, so Coca-Cola just might give it to them.

We always tell our clients the best PR is to run a good company, an ethical operation, and then your story is a lot easier to tell. Well, Wells Fargo didn’t take our advice and opened millions (yes, millions) of fake accounts for unsuspecting customers. The company has paid the price in a PR disaster. Now Wells Fargo has launched a new ad campaign called, “Re-established 2018.” And now there’s “Re-committing to You,” which has a huge billboard on I-25. Here’s what’s going on: Wells Fargo is re-branding itself, with Established 1852, re-established 2018. Or in other words, we’ve been around a long time, but we’re now an ethical company again. Are people buying it? Time will tell. Big American corporations do have staying power, but they don’t usually try to defraud most of their customers. That’s the Strategy of the Week.

For those of us who drive around Albuquerque every day, there is a vague recognition that we are a city of murals, but no one, until now, has made it official. Well, a new website has catalogued over 70 of the 500 or so murals in the Duke City. And when you take a look, you will see that ABQ has a remarkable collection of murals by some exceptionally talented artists. The website, MurosABQ.com, which shows the top murals in the city, has demonstrated that our city is a national gallery for murals. My favorites are Francis Rivera’s Desert Bloom at the South Broadway Cultural Center (seen above) and Nani Chacon’s Resilience at Washington Middle School. Take a look for your favorites.